I Love Computers and Technology

Was looking for the right place to post this... here is good. A lot of people are asking if I use Kik, or saying they use Kik. So I've lived into it a bit.. and if you think in terms of privacy (important when talking with strangers on the internet), you may want to try alternatives. So I've done a bit of digging and, after putting aside the really insecure stuff (fb messenger, Skype, kik, snapchat) and pretty secure stuff (whisper, secret, telegram) I've settled on Threema. It's cheap, great reviews, minimal data stored (can skip giving them phone numbers and whatever), and it's not US based so no men in suits showing up and demanding all their user data. Not open source (sad) but externally reviewed so.. good enough for now. Tried it out last week, very quick setup and easy to use. If you prefer something else let me know what it is and why?

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HypnoKitten · 41-45, M

Some I rejected over this ( http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/28/whisper-secret-and-snapchat-leaks-show-that-fake-privacy-is-almost-worse-than-no-privacy-at-all/ ). As for Telegram there were minor problems (eg. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2871412/how-much-trust-can-you-put-in-telegram-messenger.html ) but I think I just skipped it because of the big iPhone focus, didn't know how much with they'd put in on the Android side.

As for vendors, yea, exactly. There are just some I have to choose to trust (eg Google) and that generally appear reasonably good at respecting privacy (or at least not distributing it past their own local needs). There are some that obviously don't care like FB and MS/XBone, and there are some that might be good... but are small and you can't be sure they know what they're doing.

For Windows.. meh, yea, there is very little there surpisingly, unless the people are tech savvy and want to / know how to put in a bit of extra work. I'm still looking at that :/